Beyond Bioshock: A visual history of Irrational and Turbine

Quincy’s Irrational Games and Needham’s Turbine are both major players in the video game industry. Irrational released Bioshock Infinite on March 26 and Turbine has announcing Infinite Crisis, a multiplayer online battle game featuring DC Comics characters. As gamers open their copies of Bioshock Infinite and apply to be beta testers for Infinite Crisis, here’s a look back at some of the previous games from these two local companies (along with a quick peek at the new games).
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Irrational Games website

Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is the highly anticipated (and oft-delayed) follow-up (but not sequel) to Bioshock. The game is set in 1912 and gamers get to play as Booker DeWitt, a man who must pay off his debt by finding a missing girl in a fictional floating city. .
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Turbine website

Infinite Crisis

Infinite Crisis is a free multiplayer online battle arena featuring characters from the DC Comics universe. The game offers competitive player versus player battle experience set in the DC Multiverse—a world in which familiar DC Comics characters have been reimagined in startling ways. Featuring a wide variety of DC Comics heroes and villains, Infinite Crisis puts players in control of twisted incarnations of their favorite characters throughout the Multiverse such as Nightmare Batman and Gaslight Catwoman, playing in league with well-known characters including Green Lantern and The Flash.
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Turbine website

Asheron’s Call

Launched in 1999, Asheron’s Call was the game that put Turbine on the map. A fantasy-adventure game, Asheron’s Call lets players customize their alter ego in appearance and balance of heroic skills as they battle in a magical frontier of monsters, breathtaking vistas, and fast alliances.
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Irrational Games website

Bioshock

Widely considered one of the best games ever released, Bioshock lets you play as the sole survivor of an oceanic plane crash. According to the Irrational Games website, once your character swims to a lighthouse, you discover a bathysphere and descend to the seafloor where arch-capitalist Andrew Ryan’s city sits. Volcanic vents fuel its sprawling Art Deco facilities. Economic liberalism spurred its leading citizens to innovate in the name of prestige and profit; the gene-altering drug ADAM granted them unbelievable abilities and then drove them mad. Saving your skin could cost you your humanity; returning to the surface means delving deeper into the city of Rapture’s sordid history.
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Irrational Games website

Freedom Force

Released in 2002, Freedom Force is Irrational Games’s take on comic books. The game featured superhero characters battling villains and can still be played on PCs through distribution services including Steam.
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Irrational Games website

Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich

Released three years after Freedom Force in 2005, this game had the heroes battling an imagined Third Reich. According to the Irrational Games website, there were also two sequels that were considered, but never made.

“We had actually had two games we almost made,” recalls Ken Levine, Creative Director at Irrational Games. “One was set in the Bronze Age of comics – the ’70s – and Robb Waters [long time concept artist at Irrational] actually did a huge raft of concepts for it, and then we had a game called “Freedom Force Console” which was going to be a console game, more action oriented, and that was going to be more modern day.”
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Turbine Games website

Lord of the Rings Online

An online multiplayer universe, Lord of the Rings lets players play characters from the popular books and movies. Players can enter the universe playing a man, Elf, Dwarf, or Hobbit.
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Irrational Games Website

Tribes: Vengeance

Released in 2004, Tribes: Vengeance is a single-player game that alternates between several characters’ points of view. There is also an offline training mode that teaches skills for the first-person shooter’s multiplayer modes.
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Turbine website

Dungeons & Dragons Online

Dungeons & Dragons started as a game played mostly in players’ heads, but, Turbine helped translate the experience into a multiplayer online game. The game is truly massive with the company releasing a number of expansions to the online universe.
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Irrational Games website

System Shock 2

A first-person shooter mixed with a role-playing game, System Shock 2 offers a sophisticated plot and its fair share of scary moments. Players can choose to specialize in one of three career branches — emphasizing marksmanship, hacking and repair know-how, or paranormal mental powers — and further enhance their skill sets with cyber module upgrades.
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